land and people and circumstances of our United States need such singers and poems to-day, and for the future. Still further, as long as the States continue to absorb and be dominated by the poetry of the Old World, and remain unsupplied with autochthonous song, to express, vitalize and give color to and define their material and political success, and minister to them distinctively, so long will they stop short of first-class Nationality and remain defective. In the free evening of my day I give to you, reader, the foregoing garrulous talk, thoughts, reminiscences, As idly drifting down the ebb, Such ripples, half-caught voices, echo from the shore. Concluding with two items for the imaginative genius of the West, when it worthily rises- First, what Herder taught to the young Goethe, that really great poetry is always (like the Homeric or Biblical canticles) the result of a national spirit, and not the privilege of a polish'd and select few; Second, that the strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung. A California song A carol closing sixty-nine-a résumé―a repetition Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road After a long, long course, hundreds of years, denials After surmounting threescore and ten After the sea-ship, after the whistling winds After the supper and talk — after the day is done A glimpse through an interstice caught Ah little recks the laborer Ah, not this marble, dead and cold Ah, poverties, wincings, and sulky retreats A lesser proof than old Voltaire's, yet greater A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands All submit to them where they sit, inner, secure, unapproachable to analysis in the soul All you are doing and saying is to America dangled mirages Always our old feuillage |